Elon Musk says his brainchip patients will soon 'outperform a pro gamer', then takes a big old puff and says 'let’s give people superpowers'

Elon Musk strikes a pose in a silly outfit.
(Image credit: Taylor Hill via Getty Images)

Billionaire Elon Musk has said that humans with his company's Neuralink brain chip installed will be nailing 360 noscopes better than the pros within two years. Speaking on an episode of the Lex Fridman podcast (full transcript), Musk went on to make some even wilder claims about the tech: including the idea that Neuralink is going to have to speed up human brains so that AI doesn't get "bored".

Musk says that his idea about the "data rate" of humans came about while he was thinking about AI safety and the possible barriers to a positive human-AI convergence. "The low data rate of humans, especially our slow output rate, would diminish the link between humans and computers," says Musk, before adding a rather unbelievable coda: "Let’s say you look at this plant or whatever, and hey, I’d really like to make that plant happy, but it’s not saying a lot."

The human brain is the pinnacle of evolution and a computer that no Silicon Valley firm is even close to outperforming. We barely understand its complexity and capabilities. Comparing it to a plant… not for me. 

Nevertheless Musk insists a major goal is to somehow increase the "output rate" of humans, i.e. how fast our brain is sending signals to the chip, and reckons there's the potential to go "three, maybe six, maybe more orders of magnitude." Just in case you feel like Musk is pulling these numbers out of thin air, he goes on to agree with Fridman's suggestion that "hundreds of millions" will have Neuralinks within "the next couple of decades".

Some of the stuff Musk is saying sounds to me like psychological torture. "Let's say you can upload your memories, so you wouldn't lose memories," muses Musk, a scenario that sounds like it would drive you insane. Asked whether this is going to change the human experience, Musk says "yeah we would be something different. Some sort of futuristic cyborg… it's not super far away, but 10-15 years, that kind of thing."

Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity | Lex Fridman Podcast #438 - YouTube Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity | Lex Fridman Podcast #438 - YouTube
Watch On

It's while talking about efficiency that Musk moves onto gaming, which has been a minor theme around Neuralink, presumably because most games have clearly defined metrics and win conditions that make for easy comparison points. In May Neuralink issued an update on its first patient to be implanted with the chip, Noland Arbaugh, who noted his increasing skills with the brain-computer interface in videogames: "I'm beating my friends in games that as a quadriplegic I should not be beating them in."

"We feel pretty confident that I think maybe within the next year or two, that someone with a Neuralink implant will be able to outperform a pro gamer," says Musk, in the context of the prior chat about speeding up our brains. "Because the reaction time would be faster."

Amidst the cyber-promises, it's perhaps worth reminding ourselves that Neuralink is something that undoubtedly has great medical potential and benefits for certain people. The company's current focus is on the medical side and specifically what it may be able to do about damaged neurons, with a view to curing certain conditions that current medicine cannot.

"If they’ve got damaged neurons in their spinal cord, or neck, as is the case with our first two patients, then obviously the first order of business is solving fundamental neuron damage in a spinal cord, neck, or in the brain itself," says Musk. "So, our second product is called Blindsight, which is to enable people who are completely blind, lost both eyes, or optic nerve, or just can’t see at all, to be able to see by directly triggering the neurons in the visual cortex."

Musk can't resist getting slightly tangential here, speculating Neuralink could one day "solve" schizophrenia, and that Blindsight could later be used to enhance normal human vision ("I think you get to higher resolution than human eyes… you could see ultraviolet, infrared, eagle vision, whatever you want"). There is unquestionably the potential for this tech to make a massive positive contribution to medicine, but it's the science fiction stuff that really gets Musk going, and getting the risks of the technology down to a level where cyberpunk starts looking like a possibility.

"If you have thousands of people that have been using it for years and the risk is minimal, then perhaps at that point you could consider saying 'OK, let’s aim for augmentation,'" says Musk. "So we’re not just aiming to give people the communication data rate equivalent to normal humans. We’re aiming to give people who [are] quadriplegic, or maybe have complete loss of the connection to the brain and body, a communication data rate that exceeds normal humans. While we’re in there, why not? Let’s give people superpowers."

Neuralink is just one of Musk's technological interests, with the billionaire also knee-deep in the AI wars and currently embroiled in a huge lawsuit against OpenAI. As well as that there's SpaceX, Starlink, the rise of the Tesla Bots, and of course his incessant fascination with a platform he paid $45 billion for. Just imagine, one day Neuralink may well speed up Musk's brain, and we could get six times the terrible memes per day.

Rich Stanton
Senior Editor

Rich is a games journalist with 15 years' experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as "[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike."

Read more
Neuralink
In 2024 Elon Musk predicted that 'hundreds of millions' of people will have his brain chips within the next 20 years, so don't forget to hold him to it
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA - NOVEMBER 06: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks during the OpenAI DevDay event on November 06, 2023 in San Francisco, California. Altman delivered the keynote address at the first-ever Open AI DevDay conference.(Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
In a mere decade 'everyone on Earth will be capable of accomplishing more than the most impactful person can today' says OpenAI boss Sam Altman
CHONGQING, CHINA - OCTOBER 30: In this photo illustration - The Facebook app page is displayed on a smartphone in the Apple App Store in front of the Meta Platforms, inc. logo on October 30, 2024 in Chongqing, China. (Photo by Cheng Xin/Getty Images)
Meta might've done something useful, pioneering an AI model that can interpret brain activity into sentences with 80% accuracy
Microsoft Muse-generated gaming in action
'A massive, massive moment of wow.' Microsoft CEO predicts AI-generated games are a 'CGI moment' for the industry
Nvidia RTX 4080 Super Founders Edition graphics card
'Neural Rendering' could be the new AI-powered sorcery in Nvidia's next-gen RTX 50-series GPUs
Nvidia RTX 5090 Founders Edition rendered on a green background.
It's time for me to admit that AI-accelerated frame generation might actually be the way of the future and that's a good thing
Latest in Gaming Industry
Assassin's Creed meets PUBG
Ubisoft is reportedly talking to Tencent about creating a new business entity to manage Assassin's Creed and other big games
Possibility Space concept art.
Possibility Space owners sue NetEase for $900 million over allegations it spread 'false and defamatory rumors' of fraud at the studio that ultimately forced it to close
Valve soldier man on a pc.
2024 was Steam's 'best year ever' of users buying newly released games—but I wouldn't celebrate the end of the forever game era just yet
Money money money.
Valve tracked 1.7 million Steam users who joined in 2023 to see if they stuck around—they did, and they spent $93 million
Gabe Newell in a Valve promotional video, on a yacht.
Go ahead and complain the discounts aren't as steep as they used to be, but Steam just had its biggest year ever for seasonal sales
Pirate Bay co-founder Carl Lundstrom
Pirate Bay co-founder and far-right politician found dead after plane crash
Latest in News
Will Poulter holding a CD ROM
'What are most games about? Killing': Black Mirror Season 7 includes a follow-up to 2018 interactive film Bandersnatch
Casper Van Dien in Starship Troopers
Sony, which is making a Helldivers 2 movie, is also making a new Starship Troopers movie, but it's not based on the Starship Troopers movie we already have
Assassin's Creed meets PUBG
Ubisoft is reportedly talking to Tencent about creating a new business entity to manage Assassin's Creed and other big games
Resident Evil Village - Lady Dimitrescu
'It really truly changed my life in every possible way': Lady Dimitrescu actor says her Resident Evil Village role was just as transformative for her as it was for roughly half the internet in 2021
Storm trooper hero
Another live service shooter is getting shut down, this time before it even launched on Steam
Possibility Space concept art.
Possibility Space owners sue NetEase for $900 million over allegations it spread 'false and defamatory rumors' of fraud at the studio that ultimately forced it to close